Tuesday, June 13, 2017

The Bitter Generation

"This is the great theme of the boomers' life: They could always take a lot of wild, irresponsible chances on everything, because nearly every bet they made seemed to pay off handsomely, at least within their lifetimes. The completely predictable and obvious long-term costs were always way, way over the horizon -- a problem for somebody else. The bill, if it ever came due, would be paid by their posterity, and who cares about those losers? They don't even like the Beatles, and they're too whiny and lazy anyway."

The only thing I would add is the damage and cost associated with having to DEPROGRAM all the wrong information you were given, and then start FROM SCRATCH to reprogram yourself with absolutely no adult wisdom or template as it was completely absent from the Baby Boomer generation. You only had common sense, which was heavily mocked and ridiculed, and only the truly independent minded said, "fuck this" and blazed their own path.

Thankfully the internet is allowing younger generations to directly bypass their parents or tainted elders to at minimum have ACCESS to alternative points of view, not to mention the entire wisdom of the world. Though, it's a sad day when YouTube teaches you how to fix your car because your dad can't, or teaches you how to court women because your mom's corrupted by 70's feminism.

5 comments:

First cars. I and my buddies were all gear heads back in the 70's before the EPA F'd eveything up under the hood of a car. We could swap out anything from the head gasket on up. It was the 'thing to do' if you wanted street cred. Now? I would not even know where to begin. A third of the engines from the mfrs are nearly hermetically sealed. All of them have ECM control now. And some mfrs like Telsa say you void your warranty if you even mod the car. So advise my son on how to fix a car? Yeah we both head for YouTube. My advise on that score would be bad not because of me, but because the tech hanging off those 4 cylinders had radically changed.

Economics. What the Xers opines as everything coming up roses for Boomers is shall we say rose colored. Does he mention the S&L crisis of the '80s no. But one in 10 Boomers lost all they had and started over from scratch. Which at 40 or so is kinda tough to take with a family in tow. Or does he mention the Oil Patch Collapse coupled with 21% mortgage rates that followed soon after. (People were handing over keys to dump houses here in Texas.) Every day that a Boomer trudged off to the cube farm was for many of us another day to stave off the debt collector. It was not all fairy tales and unicorns. (ie said GenXer was birthed by 10%er and now complains he can't be.)

Changed? Dang right it has. Said GenXer should have reached for the sound card riches. His loss for not listening to his inner drummer. Look when Boomers came of age, Corps held the high ground. That is where the gold was mined. Now? Corps not so much except for the big banks. New opportunities rage on Kickstarter and Indegogo. Hell things are so twisted now that something like SnapChat that has not made a dime can be valuated at over a $1Bn. What said GenXer does not understand, is that it is easier to capitalize an idea today than ever before.

Have an idea? Build a prototype, shoot a video, make the pitch and post it on KickStarter. KS flips the whole corporate mentality of design-marketing-funding-sales paradigm. Your buyers are funding the marketing/working capital side of things, and up front to boot.

Captain, there's a world of differences between us MC Conservative Boomers and the UMC/UC Leftist Boomers (such as Bill and Hillary Clinton -- whom we hate and despise just as much as, if not more than you and everybody else does).Although I was born in the late 50's, I'm considered a Boomer and I f'n HATE it!